TERRA (The Portal Series, Book 2)

by Bowker, Richard;

  "Wake the girl," he said.

  He didn't much like Palta, I realized; she had stabbed his hand when she took the gant away from him to kill Hypatius. It didn't matter. I reached down and shook Palta awake. I pointed to Gratius. "He says they're all alive," I whispered. "In Barbarica."

  She understood immediately and scrambled to her feet. "Affron is alive?" she demanded.

  Gratius nodded. "We have no time to waste," he said. "The priests who haven't been captured or killed are plotting their strategy. Meanwhile, everyone else is fleeing Urbis, and no one is stopping them. By tomorrow the situation will have changed—you may be trapped in here. They may find a way to attack you. So we must go now."

  Palta looked at me. "But Larry wants to go home," she said.

  "That is his choice," Gratius responded.

  "Affron needs me," I said.

  "Why?"

  I looked at Gratius.

  "Before we parted in Roma, Affron told me exactly what would happen," Gratius replied. "He said that you would return to Urbis and destroy the power of the priests. I didn't believe him. I assumed that you would be caught and killed. But, you see, he was right. Here you are, in the heart of Urbis. Via is yours. Many of us have always thought that Affron was the future of Terra. But Affron apparently believes something different—he believes that Larry is the future."

  This sounded ridiculous. But Palta looked at Gratius, and then at me, and I think at that moment she began to understand something.

  "What do you want to do, Larry?" she asked. "Do you want to go home?"

  I looked at her—her blond hair, her gray eyes. She was pulling at her ear lobe. She did that so often. We had been through so much together.

  I thought about home. I had never quite understood why I had agreed to leave my world and come to Terra with Valleia. But even then, something had been happening to me, or I had begun to discover something inside me.

  It is only by setting out that we can finally return home, Affron had said to me once. And what exactly had he meant by that?

  Home, I thought, would always be a part of me. But now there was something that I had to do. "We must find Affron," I replied.

  "Are you sure?" she asked. "What about Feslund and the rest?"

  "They'll have to fend for themselves." I turned to Gratius. "We take our gants," I said.

  He nodded in agreement. "The journey may not be easy," he said. "Terra will not be safe for us—or, perhaps, for anyone."

  "All right," I said. "Let's go."

  I turned and took a last look at the portal. This was as close to home as I was going to get for a long time. Perhaps forever. And then I took Palta's hand and followed Gratius out of the temple and into the night.

  We walked quickly down the temple steps and across the empty forum. The night was cool and cloudy. The fire in the palatium was still burning. The smoke choked us. Gratius led us between two buildings and down another set of steps. At the bottom was a narrow path, and on the path was a horse and cart, much like the cart that had taken Carmody and me away from the palatium on our first night in Terra.

  An old man sat cross-legged on the path next to the horse. His head bobbed up and down as if he was half-asleep but trying his best to stay awake. Gratius motioned for us to get back in the shadows behind a tree. Then he tapped the man on the shoulder. "I'm here, Calchus," he said. "You can go back to bed now."

  He helped the man get to his feet. "Gratias, Domine," the old man said in a quavering voice. Thank you, my lord. "Terrible times, are they not?"

  "Terrible times indeed," Gratius replied.

  The old man shuffled off along the path. When he had turned a corner, Gratius motioned to us to come to the cart. He took some cloaks out of it. "Put these on," he said. "And put up the hoods."

  He did the same, covering his purple robe with a dark brown cloak. Then he got up onto the bench at the front of the cart and motioned for us to join him.

  "Will the city gates be open?" I asked.

  "Some priests are trying to keep them closed," Gratius replied. "But they will not succeed. Too many people in the city are too afraid. They can't understand why the gods have deserted them. They blame the priests. As, perhaps, they should. So they are leaving Urbis, and the soldiers who might have stopped them have been killed or have left Urbis themselves."

  He flicked the reins, and the horse started to move. "We didn't mean to kill all these people," I said.

  He shrugged. "Of course you did. Or, it didn't bother you enough to change your plan. But no matter. If it had not happened now, it would have happened eventually. The world must renew itself, and you are apparently the agent of its renewal."

  I had no idea what he was talking about. Gratius made his way out onto the main road. A thin sliver of moonlight lit the way. I could still smell the acrid smoke from the fires at the barracks, the palatium, the schola. Occasionally we passed families trudging along the road, all heading for the gates, many pulling small carts filled with their possessions. They looked up at us and probably wished we would let them ride in the cart with us, but no one asked, and we didn't offer. We were all just at the start of our journey. They would have friends or relatives in Roma or thereabouts. We had much further to travel.

  Palta pressed herself up against me, and I put my arm around her. "This must be hard for you," she murmured.

  "Yes," I said. "Very hard."

  The walls of Urbis loomed in the distance. More people joined us on the road. The city was emptying out, and I was the cause.

  I thought of my mom and dad, of Cassie and Matthew, of Kevin and Stinky Glover and Nora Lally and all my friends and relatives. Of going to high school and learning to drive and all the stuff that I wasn't going to do. It seemed so far away now. What did I care about high school or cars or baseball or movies? They were gone, completely gone. I was here in this cart, sitting between two people from utterly different worlds, going somewhere even more alien.

  We could see the gates now. They were open, and people were streaming through them. "If anyone asks you a question, say nothing," Gratius murmured to us. "Let's not take any chances."

  We didn't reply. We were safe enough, after all. If there was a problem, we had our gants. We looked around in silence as we passed through the open gates. We saw no soldiers, no priests, no officials of any kind. No one asked us anything.

  And then we were outside the walls. I thought I spotted a bit of lightness beyond the hills; dawn would arrive before long, and it looked like the rain had finally passed. I held Palta tighter.

  Urbis lay behind us now.

  Ahead lay Barbarica.

  PART VI

  Barbarica

  Chapter 31

  As always, the women at the market stared at her suspiciously and treated her with contempt. People here didn't like outsiders, and they didn't mind letting outsiders know it.

  Valleia didn't care. She had been a viator; she was used to traveling through strange worlds filled with strange people. These stout women with their muddy hair and weather-beaten faces seemed very familiar to her, even though she had never been to this place before. They were simple people living a hard life. They relied on each other to survive. And outsiders were a threat.

  But they weren't bad people. They wouldn't descend on the outsiders and murder them in their sleep. They would leave the outsiders alone and trust that before long they would go away. Which, of course, the outsiders would. Because why would anyone stay here unless they had to?

  Valleia bought bread, eggs, and butter and filled up a small jug with milk. There were no vegetables available, no fruit, no wine. After she left the market she walked down to the pier and bought fresh-caught fish from a wizened old man who touched his cap out of respect for her, instinctively knowing that she was more important than he was. Seagulls circled over the fishing boats, crying to each other. A cold wind whipped in from the ocean. Valleia pulled her woolen cap down over her ears; no robes and sandals here. It was hard to imagine ho
w cold this place would be, come winter. She talked a bit about the weather with the old man in his native language; it wasn't hard to learn, although she didn't have the accent quite right yet. Viators were good at learning languages.

  After buying the fish she walked through the town. Small shops lined the main street. Many catered to the needs of the sailors and fishermen who lived nearby. A few were for their wives and families—a clothing store, an apothecary, a shop that sold trinkets imported from Roma. None were very successful, Valleia supposed. People here didn't have much, and what they had they tended to make for themselves—they sewed their own clothes, they concocted their own remedies from plants and tree bark. This was not a bad way of living. She had been to many worlds, like the one that Larry Barnes came from, where people's homes were overflowing with objects—things that they didn't need and often didn't know they had. Were they happier for having all those objects? Valleia doubted it.

  She kept walking. Soon there were no more shops, just small houses whose owners rented rooms to sailors, or where the craftsmen lived who worked in town—carpenters, masons, shipwrights. She smelled wood burning and fish being fried. She kept going till she reached the cottage they had rented at the end of a muddy road off the main street. It was a drafty, thatch-roofed place, lovely in the summer, but increasingly less lovely as the seasons changed. Winter would arrive early here; perhaps they would be gone by then, but she didn't know for sure. They had traveled far enough; she had little wish to travel any farther.

  Carmody was chopping wood behind the cottage. He smiled when he saw her and put his ax down. "What's for breakfast?" he asked. "Wait, let me guess."

  Valleia laughed. "I need to learn new recipes, William. Maybe the women at the market will teach me."

  "They are terrified of you," he replied, picking up some of the logs he had split. "They believe you are a Roman witch. They make signs at you behind your back to ward off the evil you bring."

  "They have every reason to be afraid of me, I suppose," she said. She held the back door open for him and then followed him inside.

  The cottage had just a single larger room. It was dark and sparsely furnished. It reminded her a bit of the insula where the five of them had stayed when they first arrived in Roma—except that this place was private and quiet. And, of course, Larry and Palta were not here with them.

  She sighed. Much had happened.

  Carmody put logs into the cook-stove and the fireplace. Valleia took off her cap and set to work. Soon the eggs she had bought were frying in the butter she had bought, and a cheery fire was burning in the fireplace. She set aside the fish; they would eat it for lunch, as they did every day. She almost felt warm. Carmody cut the bread and poured the milk, and when the eggs were done they sat down at a small table before the fire.

  They ate in companionable silence. There wasn't much to say. After so much turmoil and danger, they were safe, and they were happy. The priests might try to track them down here, but they wouldn't succeed. The local folk would give the priests no help; they weren't interested in rewards, or threats, from Roma. And anyway, why would the priests think the three of them would come to this place? For all the priests' power and knowledge, Barbarica was huge, and largely unknown to them. This little part of it was called Scotia. There was no reason for anyone to go to Scotia except an occasional merchant.

  And of course they still had a weapon. A kind of weapon. Perhaps. When she and Carmody had finished their breakfast Valleia rose and cooked more eggs. She put the eggs and bread on a plate, poured milk into a cup, and placed the plate and cup along with a metal spoon on a small wooden tray. She took the tray outside, past the woodpile, to a small shed at the edge of the woods behind the yard. She knocked on the shed's door. There was no answer. There was rarely an answer. So she left the tray by the door and walked back to the cottage.

  "Did you see him?" Carmody asked when she came back in.

  She shook her head.

  "He can't stay in there much longer. The cold will drive him out."

  Valleia shrugged. "Who are we to say what he can or cannot do?"

  She was tired of thinking about Affron. She had tried to understand him, and never could. She had tried to love him, and she had thought sometimes that perhaps he loved her, but the love never seemed to blossom into something real. She knew that he was special—beyond special. Unique. The kind of man who could change the universe. She wondered if he had seen the gods who had created Via; perhaps, she thought, the gods had always been there, inside him. But she found herself losing interest in such matters.

  Because she was in love.

  Carmody was real. Smart and strong and sensible. The kind of man who would respond to your affection, who would protect you and cherish you and not take advantage of your love.

  "Let's not talk of Affron," Valleia said. "I'm sure he doesn't think about us nearly as much as we think about him."

  "That's certainly true." He pulled her down onto his lap and kissed her ear.

  She smiled. "You don't still want to go back to your home, do you?" she asked. "To Boston? To the United States of New England?"

  "This is home," he replied. "Where you are is home."

  That was a very good answer. And she was mostly sure that he meant it.

  She felt a movement inside her. It was that other life, reminding her of its existence. The life that mattered more than all of Affron's concerns. She took Carmody's hand and placed it on her belly. "He moved," she murmured.

  "He can't wait to join us," Carmody replied. "To make us a family."

  Valleia placed her head against Carmody's shoulder, and he put his other arm around her. "Everything was worth it," she said, "to be here, together."

  "Yes, it was."

  Valleia raised Carmody's hand to her lips and kissed it, basking in the warmth of the fire, and his love.

  She hoped—she trusted—that his love would never change.

  * * *

  Affron ignored the knocking, which registered dimly on his consciousness. He was too busy looking at his hand. The folds of skin on the knuckles, the tracery of the blue veins, the nails that needed to be trimmed. A tiny scar below the little finger. Dark hairs. He held it out in front of him. It moved in space, just a little. His hand was a remarkable thing.

  If he tried, he could feel Terra moving in space, in the terrifying silence of infinite emptiness.

  If he tried, he could feel Larry and Palta and Gratius moving ever so slowly across Terra—breathing, thinking, worrying. What will become of us? What is happening to us? When will we be safe? Where?

  If he tried, he could do many remarkable things.

  But why try? That was the question that baffled him. In a spinning, swirling, ever multiplying infinity of universes, what could one man accomplish? A man made of folds of flesh and traceries of veins and nails that needed to be trimmed.

  The gods heard the question and shrugged their shoulders. A man does what he can do. And then the universes move on.

  Affron moved his hand slightly to the left and, as before, it started to disappear. He kept moving his hand until it was totally gone. Gone from this universe, anyway. He felt nothing except a dizzying sense of oddness, looking at the lonely stump of his wrist. He could move his fingers, but he could not see them. They were somewhere else entirely.

  So what did that mean?

  He didn't know.

  He wondered if he would live to find out.

  He didn't know.

  He moved his hand slowly back into this universe, into the cold damp air of the shed.

  So strange.

  If he didn't live, what then?

  Then, he knew, someone would replace him.

  And that person, he knew, was moving slowly across Terra. Towards Barbarica, and his fate.

  The End

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  Want more from Richard Bowker

  Here's an excerpt from

  BARBARICA

  The Portal Series

  Book Three

  ~

  The boy went over to the shed. Arva followed. The boy stopped in front, and then walked around it. But there was nothing to see from the outside—just a small, windowless wooden building, barely more than a man's height. He raised the latch on the door and went inside. Arva followed, once again, although there was barely room inside for the two of them.

  The place was dark and musty. It contained a few tools, as Arva had guessed. No logs, but some boards, and a few old chairs stacked in the corner. And one set down in the middle of the wooden floor. The boy sat in the chair. Why? He stayed there for a while, and then he got out of the chair and knelt on the floor and put his hands out in front of him. For some reason Arva started to become very nervous. What was the boy doing?

  And then, just for a moment, Arva felt something else. He felt as if he were falling, falling, in emptiness that went on forever, that multiplied endlessly around him. And he too seemed to multiply, and every self was falling, and he knew he would fall forever.

  It was the most awful thing he had ever felt.

  And in an instant it passed. The boy was looking at him. "Me paenitet," he murmured. I'm sorry. But then he turned away and seemed to stare off into nothingness. And then Arva seemed to see the nothingness—just there, above the wooden floor. And how could that be true?

  Arva backed out of the shed. He wanted no part of this boy, or whatever he was staring at in the shed. He wanted to run away. But he forced himself to stay. He was not a child; he was not a girl. He had travelled across the world. He would not be afraid of emptiness, of nothingness. Of falling.